Members of a coalition of civil society groups, Occupy Nigeria, have protested against what they describe as the anomalies in the just concluded Presidential and National Assembly elections.

The group held a sit-in on Monday at Unity Fountain in Abuja, where they condemned the incidents in Lagos, Imo, Kogi, Kano, and other states.

“We are set to demand the correction of the electoral anomalies carried out in the just-concluded presidential election, which were visibly marred by outright rigging and extreme violence that reduced the process to an affair of a balance of terror rather than an election,” a co-convener of the group, Okpanachi Jacob, said in a statement.

He decried that the situation has left Nigerians in the affected areas short-changed, in the quest for electing their leaders.

Jacob alleged that there were many odd sides in the exercise, stressing that they do not reflect the true wishes of the Nigerian voting populace.

According to him, the journey towards conducting credible elections in the country is in jeopardy as the whole system is retrogressing into resignation.

The co-convener said, “It is imperative to note that 2019 elections have made a detour from the ongoing process of restoring integrity to the electoral process and thus, requires immediate redress so as to earn the confidence of Nigerians.”

He, however, demanded that voting must be conducted for the disenfranchised electorate in the exercise while INEC should open its back end servers to stakeholders, in the spirit of transparency.

Jacob asked the Federal Government to withdraw all military personnel in areas where there was no visible crisis and order them to stay out of elections.

He also called for fresh elections in areas where card readers were not used on February 23, as earlier asserted by the INEC as void.

•Sourced from a Channels TV report

•Members of Occupy Nigeria protesting at Unity Fountain in Abuja on March 4, 2019. Channels TV/Sodiq Adelakun.

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